Page 110 of The Winner's Curse
She focused on that nothingness, imagined it as ink spilling over everything she could possibly think or feel.
She slept.
* * *
It was a jagged, haunted sleep where her mind whirred through the words she was supposed to say when she reached the capital.
She struggled against images of Arin holding a plant, a bloody sword, her hand. She tried to wring the life out of the memory of her skin against his. Instead it beaded bright in her dark mind, strung itself out like liquid jewels, distilled down the way alcohol does, or a volatile chemical, growing stronger when forced to reduce.
Her half-asleep self said: Arin let you go because a Valorian invasion was inevitable. At least this way, he knows when to expect it.
Kestrel heard music, and it called her a liar.
Liar, the bell rang.
And kept ringing, and ringing, until Kestrel wrenched awake and out of the cabin to see the cup and spoon clanging.
Against a vicious green sky.
Green storm.
* * *
Waves vomited over the deck. Kestrel had lashed herself to the tiller and could do little more than hang on, watch the wind shred the sails, and hope she was still pointed west as the boat sheered off crests of water and pitched down, and sideways, and down.
Arin let you go so that you would die, just like this.
But even dizzy, her mind saw no sense in that.
Kestrel worked again through the words she was supposed to say, spun them out from her like knitting she had seen slaves do. She tested the words’ fabric, their fiber, and knew she couldn’t speak them.
She would not.
Kestrel swore by Arin’s gods that she would not.
* * *
No wind. She couldn’t see much. Salt water had bleared her eyes. But she heard the boat scrape against something. Then came voices.
Valorian voices.
She stumbled off the boat. Hands caught her, and people were asking questions she didn’t fully comprehend. Then one made sense: “Who are you?”
“I am Lady Kestrel,” she croaked. Unbidden—wretched, wrong—all the words she had memorized poured out before she could shut her mouth. “General Trajan’s daughter. Herrani have taken the peninsula…”
39
She woke when someone dribbled water past her lips. She came instantly alive, begging for more as it was doled out in excruciatingly small sips. Kestrel drank, and thought of things whose beauty was raw and cool.
Rain on silver bowls. Lilies in snow. Gray eyes.
She had done something, she remembered. Something cruel. Unforgivable.
Kestrel forced herself up on her elbows. She lay on a large bed. She still saw badly, but well enough to observe that the softness cushioning her body was a fur so rare and valuable its animal had been hunted nearly to extinction, and that the man who held a cup of water wore the robes of the Valorian emperor’s physician.
“Brave girl,” he said. His smile was kind.
Kestrel saw it and understood that she had succeeded. She had reached the capital, had been recognized and believed.
